Flaws in GSM standards exposed, can affect millions in a short time

Karsten Nohl, the head of Security Research Labs in Germany has found out security vulnerability in GSM phones that could allow hackers to send text messages or place phone calls by themselves from a user’s mobile phone and have total control over any mobile device. Today about 80 percent of the mobile phones around the world are GSM-based, which makes the people at target more.Hackers and criminals could use this vulnerability in the GSM network technology to make calls or send texts to expensive, premium phone and messaging services in scams thus swiping away millions of dollars of users. Attacks of these sorts have been carried out before and were only targeted to specific devices.

But now this kind of attack is having a wider attack base. “We can do it to hundreds of thousands of phones in a short timeframe,” said Nohl at the conference where he is going to present the case study. But Nohl is not offering details on the hack at the conference, thankfully.